Accelerate the transition to

instant payments

Complexity simplified

Banking customers today expect services to be available anywhere, immediately and on-demand. With payments sitting at the heart of the customer relationship, the move to instant payments is essential to provide the level of service that customers increasingly demand.

Change is nowInstant payments is, above all, an exciting opportunity to launch game changing new products with value added services – to not only retain the customers you have, but to also attract new lines of business. Long term it could also help create more and more cost efficiencies for banks driven by automation and the simplification of operations.

There is no question of the benefits instant payments deliver – the real question is how can you transition to instant payments quickly and gain market share against fast-moving competitors?

The platform for the futureAt Icon, we believe that to achieve this, you need to harness comparable technology to the new market disruptors, not systems and technology designed at the turn of the century.

Icon Solutions has developed just this kind of technology – IPF. IPF is a ground-breaking solution which codifies global instant payments experiences and learnings from the industry within open source technology.

IPF key features Faster time to

market

Rather than ‘rip and replace’, IPF complements and integrates seamlessly with institutions’ existing infrastructure, accelerating time to market by streamlining system set-up, eliminating bespoke development, and enabling one-click testing.

Improved agility

Multiple APIs and communications protocols ensure simple integration with internal and external systems. The pre-built components can be easily extended and customised by the institution rather than Icon. IPF is constantly being updated to offer further capabilities, services and opportunities.

Reduced TCO

Total cost of ownership is reduced through an open source software stack, small hardware footprint, and lower professional services fees. The release cycle is accelerated by graphical design and automated testing, while operations are simplified by maximising straight-through processing and providing rich monitoring, control and query functionality.

You need technology that has not only been designed specifically for instant payments but also:

• Complements your existing IT infrastructure• Leverages cutting-edge, future proof technology• Provides the flexibility to deliver future product

innovations

IPF key functionality

Gateway Connectivity Pre-configured gateway

to access domestic and Pan-European payments schemes

Integration Connect easily thanks to

a library of over 100 industry-standard protocols

Transformation Convert between standard and proprietary messages

Stand-in Supports 24x7 availability even when legacy systems

are unavailable

Integrity Ensure completion of

processing and the graceful handling of exception

conditions

Operational Monitoring Tools to monitor the system

health and diagnose and react to operational incidents

IPF– meeting the challenges of instant paymentsIPF accelerates the time to market, dramatically reduces total cost of ownership, and drives the development of compelling new digital services.

IPF was created as a result of our front-line experience gained from instant payments implementations around the world, such as UK Faster Payments (in fact, Icon Solutions team was involved in the design of the UK Faster Payments over a decade ago), Singapore G3 FAST and Europe’s SCT inst scheme.

IPF embodies expertise which enables you to avoid many of the common pitfalls and bumps in the road associated with instant payments adoptions, whilst also providing a future-proof underpinning of your architecture:

• Extends legacy payment systems allowing incremental change: IPF includes a range of interface adaptors to simplify connectivity into your existing infrastructure.

• 24x7 always-on availability: IPF ensures compliance with scheme rules by monitoring response times from legacy systems and dynamically providing stand-in responses when necessary.

• Real-time fraud prevention: IPF includes predefined integration for the best fraud solutions using adaptive behavioural analytics technology.

• Understanding and interpreting scheme rules: IPF comes with a pre-built SCT Inst scheme pack, providing default workflows, formats, and business logic. Importantly, our implementation builds on the non-happy-path logic not specified in the rules but gained through experience.

• Go-to-market speed: In addition to the RTP scheme pack, IPF comes with a comprehensive set of functional test cases that can be run in minutes at the press of a button.

• Scaling: IPF uses containerisation and a DevOps toolset for easy deployment and scaling.

• Availability and low latency: Adopting the best industry frameworks for highly available, highly concurrent processing as used by internet-scale providers.

Ready for European instant paymentsIn response to demand, IPF now also offers a faster and more cost-effective path to accessing SCT Inst and other payment schemes.

Our customers will now be able to accelerate the adoption of instant payments and adapt quickly to changes in the payments landscape and keep ahead of the competition. We are looking forward to supporting our clients in this journey.

What difference could IPF make to your instant payments transition?Banks making the business case for instant payments frequently face high costs to implement traditional heavy-weight payment hubs. This can tip the balance, delaying implementation until a future point and allowing competitors to erode your market share.

This doesn’t have to be the case. IPF’s approach not only provides the platform for the future, it also provides it with an overall cost of ownership that enables your business case.

We would welcome the opportunity to share more of our instant payments experience and the capabilities of IPF.

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To find out more

iconsolutions.com/ipf +44 (0) 20 7147 9955 info@iconsolutions.com